Watts Line

A tale of two man-children and their belongings.

Manchild #2 still lives at home. I say that, but the fact is that I seldom see or talk to him because in reality he works long hours and usually resides with friends closer to where the work is.

The only reason I know that he still lives here is because his dirty clothes are in a big puddle in a corner of the bedroom. I am under no illusion that the puddle will disappear anytime soon.

But the puddle taunts me. “He’s a grown person,” I argue with myself. He can do his own laundry. “But he works long hours,” I argue back. “Sure he does, but so do you,” I tell myself.

And that’s where the argument ends until the next time I see the pile. It lies there taunting me, urging me to take care of business, asking me to take control of it and clean up that corner of the house. To help him out.

And then I close the door and go into my office where I’m then visually harassed by the stack of books belonging to Surfer Dude.

“I need them,” he told me on the phone a few days before we left for our cross-country trip. He left them behind when he moved. At the time he didn’t need them.

“Sure sweetie, no problem.” And it wasn’t a problem. Not even a little bit.

We packed them as luggage and hauled across the country, the books I believed at the time to be the last of his construction, woodworking and contracting books.

Well, that’s the last of his books,” I said to the Hubster as we checked them through to the West Coast. Little by little we were retaking the real estate that we still pay for every month.

The books were in their rightful home and that was that. Until a week after our return when I was cleaning out from under the bed and found another box of books. These are probably the books he wanted, cause he didn’t seem all that excited to get the ones we took him.

Why don’t we take them to the post office and mail them? Because they weigh a ton, that’s why. He could buy new books for the cost of mailing these. They sit there, urging me to do something with them. I won’t put them back under the bed where I’ll forget them/ He’s coming home in a few weeks for a week at Folly Beach. “I’ll give them to him then,” I tell myself.

What the Hubster and I seem to have decided is that we’re ready for the empty nest, and as for actual bodies, the nest is empty. Left behind are the cracked shells and a few pin feathers clinging to the twigs of the nest, nothing more than remnants of their lives after they took flight.

Right now, I’m in the process of not washing clothes or packing books. And to tell you the truth, it’s got nothing to do with one of them being old enough to do his own laundry, or the expense of sending the rest of the books.

Despite the taunting of the clothes and the sneering of the books that I spend way too much time obsessing over, I don’t really want those remnants to be gone. They are the vestiges of the years when they were being too loud and making too much mess and not doing homework on time and staying out too late on a school night.

So I’ll let the clothes pile up and the books sit on the chair.

At least for a little while longer.

 

Surly geese the least of my worries

It was the morning after the big rainstorm last week. It started out to be a regular newsroom day: Deadline – and one photo short of a full page.

As I parked my car near the Brown Municipal Center in Goose Creek, I looked up and there they were.

Geese.

Lots of geese strutting along on a nice green lawn that sloped down to the large pond that runs behind the facility.

The geese would make a great photo. The photo fairy had landed right in front of me and despite the soggy conditions it was up to me to take advantage of the situation.

So I grabbed my camera and headed out across the lawn. The soggy, boggy ankle-deep-squishy, grassy, spongy lawn.

But that was okay. I walked slowly toward the flock and they moved further away towards the water just as I had hoped. They’d look prettier with the water as a backdrop, I thought. So I shot photo after photo, hoping to get one in focus before they decided to fly away. Every now and again, they’d look at me, and stomp a little further away. I didn’t rush them, because I knew they just might turn and attack. (I remembered hearing that they could be mean. I’d even heard once of some junk yard guard geese.)

So I was careful. I didn’t want to be the victim of a goose-peck attack.

I shot and snapped and snapped and shot until I finally felt like I had just about all I needed, but then decided to get just one more shot. Just one more. That would be the best one. I crept a little closer and shot the last one.

That’s when I realized that my feet were on fire. I looked down to discover I was under attack, not from the geese, but from the fire ants upon whose hill I was standing. I yelped and the geese hustled away. The ants did not.

I was standing squarely on top of their house, and they were pretty upset about my size tens messing with their mound and let me know by stinging, biting and causing me to go immediately into panic mode. I reached down and pulled off my sodden, muddy shoes and headed up the hill, muttering and stopping from time to time to brush the ants off with one hand, while holding the shoes and camera in the other. I scanned the way in front of me for more ant mounds and finally decided that the hill I had stood on was literally the only one anywhere on the rather large grassy field.

About halfway up the hill my hands felt like they had burst into flame. The shoes had been covered in ants that were now making their way between my fingers, over my wrists and up my arms.

Then there were the few who had stayed on my feet and then traveled up my pants leg and were now feasting behind my knees.

So, I went into high gear, made my way back to the car and drove quickly to the office. I took care of the situation as best I could, knowing there would be a few bite blisters from the varmints.

“I just had to have that one more photo,” I kept mumbling over and over again.

Were the pictures worth it? Not really. The best ones (and even they were pretty lame) were made way before the last few that I just had to have.

Would I do it again? Go in pursuit of the next possible great photo?

Of course.

Fish in trees and other family tales

There’s one thing that sitting in a cabin by the lake with about a dozen and a half of your best friends and relatives will get you: a retelling of what I call “the family tales.”

This weekend’s tales took a turn toward “things in trees.”

My sister said she walked out in her yard a couple of weeks ago on one of the hottest days of the summer (and there certainly have been plenty to choose from) and saw something red up in a big old oak tree out back.

“I looked at it for a few seconds and walked over closer and looked some more. I finally decided I was looking at a tomato.”

That’s right. A big-old-ripe-red tomato.

“I couldn’t imagine how the tomato got up there. Then I thought, mayber Alex (her 13-year-old son) had put it up there for some reason. He’s a Scout, you know, and they’re always doing weird nature stuff that I don’t understand.

But she said she finally decided that didn’t make a lot of sense (not that 13-year-old boys are known for their overabundance of common sense).

“About then a squirrel ran up the tree, grabbed the tomato and appeared to suck on it. I figure things are so hot and dry that’s the only liquid the poor old squirrel could find.”

I told her that story wasn’t as good as the one about the day we were out fishing. She and I were out on the lake in Daddy’s fishing boat. We weren’t exactly tearing them up as he would have said, so in my boredom, my eye wandered along the shore and something up in a tall pine tree caught my eye. Something shiny moved on a limb maybe 70 feet up the tree.

I poked her with the end of my fishing pole.

“What’s that,” I asked.

She and I sat there a minute and watched the shiny moving object.

“It’s a fish,” she said.

“Yep. It’s a fish alright,” I said, agreeing with her.

So we sat there and watched it.

“How do you suppose it got up there,” I asked.

“I haven’t got the first idea,” she said.

Again the fish flopped and miraculously didn’t fall from its precarious perch before a big crane swooped in and carted it off, the silvery fish flopping in its beak.

But my favorite tree story of the evening came from my favorite storyteller, The Hubster.

When he was 12 years old and living on an Air Force Base in a distant state, he and a friend one day decided each to get a squeeze bottle like the ones that dishwashing liquid comes in.

“We took the bottles, filled them up with water and climbed way up into a big tree next to a road on the backside of the base. Every time a car drive underneath the tree, we squirted the windshield with water.”

“We laughed and laughed. It was great. When the water ran out we started climbing down from the top of the tree to go get more water.

“Just as we were about to jump down, a base patrol car pulled up under the tree and the policeman got out. We were scared to death,” he said. “Our dads were Lt. Colonels – and we sure didn’t want to get caught.”

The policeman got out of his car and looked over the splash marks on the pavement, then looked around both sides of the road.

“If he’d have looked up he’d have seen us standing no more than a foot over his head. But he didn’t look up and finally got in his car and drove off. We ran all the way home and no one ever knew.”

Now, my guy is still here to tell about it so it’s for sure no one ever found out – til now, of course.

So, here’s to fish in trees, squirrels sucking on tomatoes and little boys getting into mischief, but not too much trouble.

And especially here’s to sitting around on the porch telling family stories.

Contact Judy Watts at 873-9424, ext. 220 or jwatts@journalscene.com

Hot summers and cool fans

t's been right hot lately. Miserably hot. I drive down the road and see folks who work outside for a living and I break into a sweat just looking at them. Are they okay? I hope so. Does a person actually adjust to that kind of heat and intense outdoor work? Maybe I'm just a sissie. I'm not a big fan of sweating, which probably comes from those days before air conditioning when all we did all summer long was sweat. Even Belk's (back before they dropped the possessive) didn't have air conditioning.

I was in eighth grade before we got our fist air conditioner (and no we aren't from some cold state like Maine. We're from good old South Carolina as far back as we can figure without doing a whole lot of research.)

Our first AC was a big old loud thing that lived in the den window. The days before that first AC were a whole different way of living.

We had a window fan that was mounted in the small window on the back of the dining room. Now for those of you who didn't grow up in the dark ages and don't know the joys of living without central air or the pleasures (yes, there are a few) of cooling off with fans, you really haven't experienced summer in S.C.

The first fan I remember is a brown oscillating fan with a heavy dark brown wire cage around the blades. On the motor was a knob you could turn to make the fan point steadily in one direction. You could twist the same knob so that the fan would sweep back and forth, spraying its semi-cool air in a horizontal arc around the room. On really hot days, the anticipation of the next sweep of the fan was like waiting for Christmas -- little bits of pleasure doled out in bursts of tepid breeze on hot damp skin. I loved sitting still waiting for the next blast and feeling it lift my hair up from my hot neck. (One of my earliest recollections is as a four-year-old holding my doll dress in front of the fan waiting for the air to blow on it so I could watch it billow out -- and at just the wrong time, I dropped it and watched in horror as the dress got sucked into the fan. The dress twisted into the blades, froze them up the blades and sent me into screaming fits that almost caused my mother to have a heart attack until she realized that nothing was really all that wrong that couldn't be easily remedied.

The next most important fan I had a relationship with was (and still is) the box fan I took with me to what was then Winthrop College. The fan spent a lot of time propped in the open window of my Roddey Hall dormitory room -- both summer and winter. There was no air conditioning in the summer and the steam radiator heat in the winter would just about bake us, so the window was open and the fan running nearly year round. In fact, I got so used to the fan's soft whir, that for years after I graduated, I ran it while I slept. The white noise of it was addicting and to this day I still sleep more soundly in a room when a fan is on.

Fans are usually secondary to other cooling these days. But an air conditioned room, while comfortable, just doesn't have that South Carolina ambience to it. It's a barrier between us and the hot humid days we're so famous for.

In reality I like to be cool. but I'm also glad that I know what it is to listen to crickets through an open window as the window fan sucks in a thick nighttime breeze that drags across damp-with-summer-heat arms and legs.

Going wireless no breeze

Soft ocean breezes, family and friends, good food, paying homage to the sun in order to get a few more character lines - you know. The good stuff. Wonderful.

Except for. There's always the except for. These days work travels with us. In my case the work is of my own making since I didn't want to miss a week with the column. I sat on the deck and leisurely wrote last week's Watts Line about fans, the heat, and the Land before the Time of Air Conditioning.

But this, as Paul Harvey would say, is the rest of the story.

The column was completed at 3 p.m. and I figured there must be a way to send it from my laptop even though the house we'd rented didn't have a wireless connection. I'd pick up someone else's and use it. That worked pretty well before everyone got smart. But this time, no matter what I tried, it was a no go. Folks have learned to protect their home wireless connections. I could get a signal, but I didn't have the password to get in.

I finally looked at the Hubster in exasperation.

"I'll just drive down to the library and use theirs. Surely they have an internet connection." I told The Hubster.

I gathered my electronics and got in the car, shut off from the wind blowing in off the beach, and drove the few miles to the library. I parked lugged my stuff up to the door and ... the library was closed. It didn't open until 4 p.m. I looked at my watch. - it was 3:30 p.m. "That's just great," I muttered under my breath. Great.

I had noticed a nice garden in back so I wandered back there and found a bench and fired up the laptop hoping for a signal. There were lots of signals, but again they were protected. I packed the computer and went to the car and drove to a nearby upscale caf�. It was 3:40.

"Very trendy place," I said out loud to myself. "That kind of place wouldn't be caught dead without a wireless."

I asked the waiter, hopeful.

"Nope. No wireless connection," he said. "Wish we did."

"Me, too," I said. He offered directions to a nearby bar that had a hot zone.

I drove round and round for another 10 minutes but never found it. By then it was nearly 4 p.m. so I went back to the library. I waited an extra bit in the car to be sure that when I got to the door it'd be open. And it was. There was even a sign inside that mentioned Internet signups pointing through a door to my right. I was excited. It was worth the await. Success at last.

" I need to use your wireless connection," I told the lady at the desk.

"We don't have a wireless," she said.

I must have looked rather crestfallen.

"We do have a land line and if you will just fill out these forms, you log onto one of our computers," she said.

I filled out the form and handed it back to her. She took me to the terminal and gave me a code that would allow one hour of use. Soon I was online. Only problem was that the column was in my computer and I had no disk or stick or anything else to move it from point A to point B. I had to retype the column into the computer.

I'm a lousy typist. I finished the chore at about 4:30 and sent the column. I packed up my stuff and trudged back to the car. By the time I got back to the beach house it was 4:50 p.m. and everyone else was on the beach enjoying the sea breeze.

It took me about an hour to write the column and nearly two hours to send it to the office. It would have taken slightly less time to drive back to Summerville, deliver the column in person and drive back to the beach.

I'm thinking the drive, even in rush hour traffic, would have been less annoying.